Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Bud Kennedy of my hometown Fort Worth Star-Telegram is really concerned about the Tea Party movement (see here for his latest column). Apparently, it's a scandal that many Tea Party activists/supporters/organizers also are Republicans.

When you sign up for e-mail from the supposedly nonpartisan Common Sense Texans network of Tea Party members, you’re giving your address to a Dallas Republican lawyer and social-networking-campaign expert who has been an activist for private-school vouchers...

For example, the Web site commonsensetexans.net, a sign-up and information site for 34 Tea Party and 912 Project groups in Texas, is registered to Dallas lawyer and Tea Party coordinator Ken Emanuelson, a Fred Thompson campaigner and veteran Republican organizer.

Wow! How bizarre that an umbrella website for Tea Party groups in Texas would be run by someone both interested in conservative politics and has experience organizing political groups? Must be a conspiracy!

Apparently, Kennedy, along with many on the left, is most concerned that Tea Partiers aren't all rubes with pitchforks and without political savvy. The idea that Republicans might also agree with many of the 9 principles and 12 values of the 912 project is too difficult to accept as anything other than a hoax for some people.

Kennedy's column also leaves some big unanswered questions. If one of the four Tea Party groups serving the Grapevine-Keller-Southlake area (a cluster of posh suburbs in Tarrant County) is run by a "veteran Republican organizer," who runs the other groups? Is there a reason being a Republican precludes one from also supporting the Tea Parties? And if 1/3 of Tea Partiers "claim libertarian views," what does that say about the other 2/3?

It's obvious that the Tea Party movement, with its call for less government spending and more limited government, chafes against those who support Democrats and their principles of off-the-charts spending and government encroachment on private citizens. It would make more sense for those Democrat supporters to spend their time arguing why spending trillions of dollars we don't have for programs we don't want is a good thing, rather than attacking their opponents as illegitimate.

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